The Expatriates (6 page)

Margaret, who was used to being above average in most things, couldn’t understand the gap. This was the hardest thing she had ever done, and arguably the most important. And no one was acknowledging that it really, really sucked. A lot.

This metamorphosis into that other being, that mother, was excruciating. She noticed that it got better in quarters. Three months, six months, nine months. And then suddenly she woke up and she felt better. She was not back to normal—that baseline had shifted. But she could cope with her life.

Later, people would ask, “Why didn’t you see anyone?” And certainly, after the incident happened, she did—it was practically court-ordered. But at that time, with that first child, she never felt that desperation was a good reason to see someone. And where would she have found the time? She didn’t have time to shower, let alone see a therapist or have a leisurely cup of coffee with a friend. And then the others came, and they were different and easier, because she had already crossed over into that other country of motherhood.

She thinks about that a lot, how you get used to everything, that the first shift is difficult and horrible, and you live your life because what else can you do, and then one day you wake up and your life seems normal. You start to forget the bad times. You shift into your new self.

At least, that’s what she had thought about life and change.

The other pregnancies were less vivid, and she was certainly less careful. She drank coffee with Philip; in the last five weeks of her
pregnancy with G, she had a glass of wine every few nights. Of course, there was not the luxury of movie watching and solitude. She had Daisy and then Philip and her whole blazing new life as a mother. Everything revolved around the children. And here she was, in Korea, traveling with them to her quarter home country and feeling blessed.

They spent a lovely day wandering the streets of Insa-dong, where they bought colorful stationery, browsed through secondhand bookstores, walked through art galleries and craft shops, and saw a cart vendor selling fried silkworms from a cast-iron vat—a nostalgic treat for those who remembered when Korea was so poor they couldn’t afford meat and insects were an important source of protein. They couldn’t bring themselves to try them but bought roasted chestnuts from the vendor next to him, cracking and peeling the soft shells and eating the warm meat of the nut. Margaret carried G when he got tired, and he nestled his head into her neck.

At three, Margaret shepherded the exhausted kids back to the hotel and found Mercy doing yoga on a towel on the floor. “Did you have a good day?” she asked.

“I just walked around here,” Mercy said, from down dog. “I’m going to try to meet up with some relatives if I get a chance.”

“Great.” She paused. “Well, the kids are hungry, since we’re an hour ahead. You might as well eat now. I guess you could order room service, or go down to the restaurant? What do you think?”

“It’s pretty small in here,” said Mercy. “I think we should probably go downstairs.”

“Okay, just don’t leave the hotel.” She felt absurd that she even had to say it but wanted to be sure. The kids were excited to see Mercy, and she took them, chattering, telling her all that they had done, down the hallway and into the elevator.

Margaret went back to her room and got into the shower. She was meeting Clarke in the lobby at five, and they were going to the company headquarters to meet some people and then out to dinner.

In the car, Clarke ruffled her hair and asked about her day.

“It was good,” she said. “Where we were was really charming. And I think we’re going to meet my great-uncle tomorrow. He had his son e-mail me back with a time and a restaurant. Very sweet e-mail. We’re going to have lunch.”

“Great,” he said. “I don’t think I can make it. Is that okay?”

They sat for a moment, quiet, happy, hands intertwined in the backseat. She remembered this moment later as one of the last times she felt totally content.

At the office, she met some people, who all bowed, so she bowed back, feeling her 75 percent Americanness very strongly, and when she went to the bathroom, she saw a strange glass cabinet full of toothbrushes.

“What’s that for?” she asked one of the ladies in the office.

“Koreans like to eat Korean food,” the woman replied, giggling and covering her mouth, “but it smell very strong. We always brush teeth after lunch. It is an ultraviolet light cleanser, so it sterilizes all the toothbrushes so it is hygienic.”

“Oh, wow,” Margaret said. She was six inches taller than any other woman in the room and felt incredibly large.

They went out to a barbecue restaurant and ate
bulgogi
and drank beer and came back to the hotel with smoky hair and pungent clothes, and when she peeked into the kids’ room, they were watching a movie, bathed and pj’d, and they swore they had brushed and flossed. Mercy winked at Margaret, and she softened. She was charming, in an odd sort of way. She felt sorry for Mercy, although she didn’t know why.

The next day, she met her extended family for lunch with the kids, having given Mercy the day off again. It was at a barbecue restaurant (the amount of meat you consumed in Korea was extraordinary) with an outdoor garden and ponds, and they all took a photograph in front of the fake waterfall. It reminded her of old-fashioned family portraits as they seated her great-uncle and his wife in the front center and radiated out, agewise. There was much exclaiming and smiling and broken English and broken Korean. They were about twenty in all, many second and third cousins, who had brought their children, who played with Daisy
and Philip and G in the outdoor garden. Margaret showed them pictures of her father and his parents, and they showed her old photo albums of their side of the family. The relatives showered them with presents—a woman’s silk scarf for her, hair accessories for Daisy, a tie for Clarke and toys for the boys—and she was mortified that she hadn’t thought to bring anything. She snuck off to pay the bill, and when the waiter presented her with the credit card slip, there were stricken faces all around.

“I have to pay!” she said. “So many presents! I no give anything!” resorting to pidgin English for some embarrassing reason.

“You our guest,” they said. “You come to our country.”

She signed the slip, embarrassed, and finally they smiled.

She looked at a cousin and tried to see her father’s face. He had died too early, her father, and she could not remember much about the way he looked anymore. She wanted to feel a connection to this family of hers but knew that if she saw some of them in the hotel lobby the next day, she would be hard-pressed to recognize them.

At the end of the meal, she brought the kids back to the hotel for a rest before dinner. Mercy was there, and she ordered another movie for them.

“We’ll go somewhere fun for dinner,” she said. “Daddy has to go to a work dinner, so it’ll be you guys, me, and Mercy.”

And then. And then.

She went to pick them up a few hours later, and she and Mercy took them out to the bustling Myungdong area, just in front of their hotel. It was crowded and neon and loud and had a carnival atmosphere, with people selling remote-control cars and light sticks out of boxes, cart vendors lining the sides of the road, shoe and clothing stores blaring K-pop. The young kids had dyed hair and wore trendy clothes.

“Korea is so consumerist,” Margaret had said to Mercy. She remembers this so clearly, the unimportant remark.

“I know,” Mercy said. “It’s terrible.”

Margaret was watching all three kids, and then one kid, and two kids, all at the same time, and assumed Mercy was doing the same.
They were darting back and forth, looking at this display, shouting to one another about that store window. They came upon a soft-serve ice cream cart where the ice cream was dispensed in swirls ten inches high.

Margaret bought everyone a cone, and they sat down and licked them clean. Margaret went to the bathroom inside a Starbucks and came back.

“Where’s G?” she asked.

Mercy looked around slowly. “He was just here,” she said.

They both looked around, couldn’t see him, asked Daisy and Philip if they knew where he was. They didn’t.

Margaret started walking around, looking for him. Then she started calling his name. Then, after a few minutes, there was that moment when it tipped into panic and she started shouting his name, not caring if she was making a spectacle of herself. She started screaming at the top of her lungs. “G! G! Where are you?”

The amazing thing was that life went on. Around her, people waited in a line to get movie tickets. A girl in a doorway lit a cigarette. But they were all staring at her, staring at the crazed, shouting woman. They were living their normal, regular life, only they were all staring at her, wondering what was wrong. Suddenly they all seemed sinister to Margaret, as if they were all possible child abductors, or insanely important, as possible witnesses with clues as to where G was: That old man with the salt-and-pepper beard was a pedophile, that young man with the slicked-back hair and the black leather jacket was a cog in a child-smuggling ring, that nice-looking woman must have seen something. But no one came forward, no one bolted. There was no G. It was as if she were in one of those movies where the camera swings around 360 degrees, dizzyingly, relentlessly. She stood and she ran and she turned around and scanned and screamed and screamed.

It was the lack of an answer, his small voice crying, “Mama!” as he came running toward her. The same voice that had once, already it seemed so long ago, triggered irritation in her, irritation that she was to be interrupted in the middle of something, that his knee had
been scraped and he wanted a bandage, or that his brother wouldn’t share, and she would have to get off the phone, or stop writing down her grocery list. His voice was gone.

Later the technology defeated her. Her phone didn’t work. She had just gotten the newest phone, and there was some type of new network it was supposed to work on, and it just didn’t. As soon as they had arrived in Seoul, her phone had started acting erratically. She hadn’t been getting e-mails, only sometimes texts would go through; the phone would ring randomly and never connect. The idea that something so prosaic could ruin her efforts to find her child made her even crazier. She crouched down on the street, pushing at different buttons, trying to get it to work, trying to borrow a phone from someone else, although she didn’t even know the number for the police. Shouting about 4G networks, police, and G, as if they were all important. She was trying to get something to go right, even just a phone call. She was trying to remember how to dial in a foreign country. She needed to get in touch with Clarke. She needed to know if abduction was common in Seoul. She needed so many things. She remembered later that her phone sometimes rang, but when she picked it up, it disconnected, and later, that it was on vibrate, because she must have pushed that button inadvertently. She had her phone in her shaking hands, clutching it with desperation, willing it to connect her to someone who could help, someone who would do something. She screamed at Mercy to go to the hotel and get someone to help. Around her, Korean people stopped and stared. She noticed this too, in a corner of her mind, that they just stood still and stared at her. She supposed they were voyeurs, but also grateful that today it wasn’t them, that disaster could press by you so closely in a crowd that you could feel its terrible presence but that you could go home and eat dinner with your family and say a silent thank-you that it had passed you by.

Daisy and Philip were mute, standing close to her without being told, terror holding them rigid. She regretted this later, that they had seen her so unhinged. She thought that Clarke would have handled it better. They didn’t cry until much, much later, when they were told to
go to bed by their ashen father, and then they cried and cried and cried and couldn’t sleep until all of them went silent in the room, Margaret holding Clarke’s hand as they sat in chairs overlooking the street where it had all happened. She had spent a few hours in the nearest police station filling out forms with a nice young lady who spoke some English. The added layer of not knowing how to speak or write the language she saw all around her made her feel as if she couldn’t breathe, that she couldn’t move freely in this world.

She had wanted to stay in the street where she had last seen him, but after five hours, at eleven at night, the other children were falling apart and needed to be in a quiet room. Still, she had put them in their room with Clarke, Mercy a black void among them, not physically there but a terrible presence still, and then she had gone back to the street, where she had stayed until one in the morning, when the streets were empty and she had to admit there was little chance that G would be brought back. She came back and watched Daisy and Philip shift uneasily in their restless sleep, with this blackness inside her stomach. They were still in their clothes. She had no idea where Mercy was.

This is what could kill you about children as you watched them: the way they slept, their open-mouthed unconscious faces, their frail collarbones, their defiant stance right before they cried, their innocence. Their crazy, heartbreaking innocence. It could really kill you, if you thought about it.

She wanted the hours back. She wanted to go back ten hours, to when life was understandable. She wanted to not ever have to go to the bathroom again. She wanted to have a kind stranger lead a crying G back to her, to be enfolded tight in her waiting arms, to be squeezed, to feel the corporeal flesh of him, the shaking, sobbing child. This was understandable. The absence of him was incomprehensible. Most of all, she wanted to erase Mercy from her life. To absent the girl and get her boy back. That was what she wanted.

H
ILARY
PAUSES
. There is a stain on the piano’s ebony surface.

“Puri,” she calls. “There is a water mark here from where Julian left his glass during his lesson.”

At some point in her life, she realized that she never says anything directly anymore. She has become a master of indirection, or misdirection. She will say, “Mr. Starr is arriving from Kuala Lumpur at 11:00 p.m. tonight” or “I stained this blouse with red wine at dinner,” when she should say, “Please keep the lights on and notify the gate guard that Mr. Starr will be late” or “Send this out for dry cleaning.”

Puri, of course, cannot always decode the message, and Hilary will come across the garment, still stained, folded neatly in her closet, or David will complain that the guard didn’t let his airport car into the complex without an ID check.

She has noticed how, as she grows older, she is more and more reluctant to say anything directly, even to her husband.

She will tell him, “I haven’t told anyone else about that,” when she means to say, “Don’t tell anyone.” When David later says he has mentioned it to a friend, she gets upset, and he will exclaim, in the simple way of men, “Why didn’t you just tell me you wanted to keep it private?” and she will retire, injured. He should have intimated, she thinks. Intimated, because they are supposed to be intimate. He should have known.

So she does not say, “Please try to get the stain off the piano.” She walks into the kitchen and says, “Puri, I’m leaving now.”

Julian is sitting there, having a snack. Usually she would be there
with him, but she forgot her lunch appointment and now cannot cancel. He is seven, wary. He comes, once a week, for his piano lesson, paid for by the Starrs, a new arrangement that has already revealed itself to be static and in need of change, but one that she has no idea how to alter. She sat with him during his lesson, as she always does, watching his slender fingers hover over the keys. He is talented. She found Julian in foster care, half Indian, half Chinese, left by his teenage mother. At the table now, he looks up and gives a shy smile, with his light brown skin and beautiful dark eyes, ringed with impossibly long lashes. How odd, she thinks, to not know whether his mother was the Chinese or the Indian half. The system must know, she thinks, but she doesn’t want to ask. But this seems a vital part of the equation. He will want to know, she thinks, and he should be able to find out. She should find out for him.

“I have to go out for lunch, Julian. Sorry I couldn’t reschedule it. Sam will come to take you back in fifteen minutes, after he drops me off. I’ll see you next week.”

She thinks he understands her but isn’t sure. His English is almost nonexistent, but he is agreeable. He gets in the car to come here, he plays the piano, he eats the snack they give him, and then she takes him back to the group home. She gives him a kiss on the cheek and goes home. Another odd event in his odd life.

Sam is waiting downstairs for her in the car. She gets in, and even in the cooler air, the interior is redolent of body odors. Humors, she thinks. The humors of the body, escaping through those tiny pores, roiling around the interior of the car.

Chinese or Filipino? everyone had asked when she said she was hiring a driver. Sam is Indian, an anomaly, but he grew up in Hong Kong, speaks fluent Cantonese, and knows every street in Hong Kong. She thought he would be happy to see Julian visit, but he is odd about it. Later she realizes that he thinks Julian is a street child, beneath him, a proper working man with a family. She realizes that everyone wants to find his own level.

Sam starts the car, and they go to the club.

Hilary sits, hidden behind sunglasses, waiting for her friend Olivia. Children are playing on the lawn while their mothers sip tea and gossip. A boy falls and cries. His mother goes to comfort him. She is a woman Hilary sees at the club every time she is there: a woman with three children, two girls, one boy. Today the woman is in dark jeans that show her wide hips and bottom and a white wool sweater that is stretched across her large breasts and hugs the shelf of flesh above the waistband of her jeans. The muffin top, Hilary knows it is called, the soft, doughy edge that tips over the waistband of your pants. The woman stands up and returns to her group of friends.

Hilary views the thickening torsos and thighs of her peers with a visceral disgust. How can they let themselves go like that, these women, as if it didn’t matter? Even if they did have children, surely it can’t be too much work to refrain from shoving éclairs and cream puffs down their throats for a few months? She was a heavy child, but she lost weight, and she kept it off. She looks at their arms, spilling out of their clothes like ham hocks, and the way their faces are cushioned in multiple folds, what she calls carb-face, and is nauseated. They have plates of food in front of them, chicken satay in congealing pools of oil, half-eaten grilled cheese sandwiches, glistening mounds of French fries with violent squirts of tomato ketchup.

They are so cheerful, the mothers, so enamored of themselves and their lives, as if the fact of bearing children earned them some unnamed right to sit in the dappled sun with their warm drinks cooling in the winter air and their disheveled hair and their ketchup-stained clothes. Hilary loathes them. She loathes them so much.

They are so lucky.

A year had passed before she thought anything wrong. She had gone off the pill, but it had been a casual event, after a dinner with a lot of wine, a lot of giggling about pulling the goalie, about whether they were really this old. They had not had a great longing for children; it was more
of a maybe-it’s-about-time—they had been married two years. She supposed, they had both not been against it. The irony of their casual decision! She was thirty; they had just moved to Hong Kong. When it didn’t happen, month after month, she got nervous, figured out when she was ovulating by taking her temperature, made sure David was in town during her fertile time, as he traveled so much for his job. Sex became a chore, a baby-making effort. But nothing happened.

It has been eight years now, eight years during which she has seen friends have one or two or three children, or twins, a veritable frenzy of fertility, pregnancies, baby showers, births, and hospital visits, until they slimmed down and told her again, over lunch, apologetically, that they were pregnant again.

And yet she doesn’t want to go any further. The hormones, she has heard, make you fat, swollen, moody. She has been reading about the surrogate village in India—a friend forwarded the article—and the thought makes her feel faint.

So instead she waits. She thinks sporadically about going to a doctor, but then that thought is always drowned out by the thought that surely if it is to be, it will happen naturally. She is frightened by the thought of pregnancy, by the thought of her body changing. The body she knows so well and knows how to control so well. It is not the idea of being pregnant that moves her. She would like a child. She would like to be a mother.

David follows her lead, is amenable to what she wants. Their relationship has cooled in the meantime, cooled into politeness and well wishes, but she pushes that thought away, because how many difficult thoughts can one handle in one sunny afternoon? Perhaps a baby, a pregnancy, will save them from this gradual decline. But how to get there? She pushes the thought away again. She sits instead, wills her mind to go blank, sips at her iced tea, feels the smooth passage of it down her throat. She waits for her friend.

Hilary is from San Francisco, but not the San Francisco where everyone seems to be hiking or biking while chugging sports drinks,
or doing some other sort of physical outdoor activity, and then talking about it endlessly. When people find out she is from the Bay Area, their eyes light up and they talk about this hike or that park, and she says, “Oh, I don’t know from that.” Or they talk about Napa Valley and the vineyards, and the cheese! “I like it,” she says. She is not effusive, the way people seem to want everyone to be, full of excitement and vim. She grew up just outside San Francisco, where her parents live still, and she moved to the city when she got her first job in PR.

She spent her early twenties working and then met David at a friend’s wedding. Everything according to plan. They married when she was twenty-eight, ten years ago. He was an associate at a law firm with offices all over the world, and he had always wanted to travel and live abroad. She said she would go with him anywhere.

After moving, there was a new vocabulary to learn: “lifts” instead of “elevators,” “flats” instead of “apartments”—vestiges of the British colony Hong Kong used to be. Also, instead of a housekeeper, the province of only the rich in America, everyone in her new world had a live-in domestic helper from the Philippines or Indonesia, who took care of all the housework and babysitting for the astounding sum of US$500 a month. They live in a particularly homogeneous enclave of expatdom, Repulse Bay, where half the people they see are white, and more than that are not locals, be they Chinese American or Japanese or Filipino. In this particular corner of Hong Kong, newly arrived Americans bump into one another at the supermarket and talk of their sea containers, arriving soon with their belongings, how to find a travel agent, how to get a driver’s license. The husbands get up in the morning, put on their suits, and take taxi-shares or minibuses or are driven to work in the tall, shiny office buildings in Central, while the women putter around the house before getting ready for their tennis match or going in to volunteer at the library, since they mostly had to give up their jobs when they moved. It all feels a bit like
The Truman Show
.

Still, even within this sphere, Hilary soon came to see the very fine distinctions.

There were the new expats, who signed up for courses on Chinese cooking at the MacDonnell Road YWCA, took the train to Shenzhen to buy fake DVDs and cheap dinnerware, went to the Art Village to have paintings copied cheaply for their apartments (“A funny Lichtenstein for the bathroom is so cute, don’t you think?”), and did first vacations in Phuket. Then there were the intermediate expats, who went to Bhutan to trek and Tokyo to eat and eschewed the touristy. They had favorite hikes. They threw out the IKEA furniture and bought real antiques. They had some local friends, a Mandarin nanny, and preferred to eat at restaurants secreted away in office towers. They started small businesses, like children’s clothing or jewelry design, all made in China, and sold their wares at the holiday gift fairs that sprouted up in hotel ballrooms around December. And then there were the old Hong Kong hands, who had racked up ten, twenty years in the colony. They were mostly in Hong Kong for good, sometimes had given up citizenship in their former countries. They owned their homes, always bought on a dip in the property market, didn’t talk to newcomers, and smiled blankly when people brought up newbie topics like schooling and medical care, as if they had mentioned something as unspeakable as their bathroom habits.

Of course, there were the international lines as well. The Japanese were a discrete group and rarely mingled, playing baseball and soccer together every weekend at the municipal athletic fields, with their neatly packed bento lunches and peculiarly named sports drinks. The French and Koreans were a bit more porous, the English perhaps a bit more, and the Americans most of all, although, after a few years of socializing strenuously with everybody, people tended to slip back into their national identities. It was just so exhausting to have to explain what a state school was, or how football and soccer were different. After a few years, even the most well-meaning Americans found themselves calling only other Americans and doing Super Bowl breakfasts (due to the time difference) and Thanksgivings at the club with other families. You found yourself somehow more American than ever.

Hilary has become firmly ensconced in her new life, one she slipped into frighteningly easily, as David’s career flourished in Asia over the past eight years. He is now one of the most senior attorneys at his firm. Hilary has servants—a domestic helper and a driver—a membership to a country club, where she plays tennis with other sun-visored ladies, and afterward, showered and dried and clad in cool summer shifts, they order Greek salads and salted French fries and sip pinot grigio as the sun sets and their husbands work and they gossip and complain and otherwise act as if life has always been this way.